


Holiday Snippets 2019

by HopefulPenguin



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: F/F, Merry Christmas!, Mostly Life Bends Down Omakes, Or Happy Hanukkha!, Snippets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21951595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopefulPenguin/pseuds/HopefulPenguin
Summary: Assorted Christmas snippets! None of them are Christmas themed! So it's really just some snippets, I guess.
Relationships: Hannah | Hana | Miss Militia/Emily Piggot, Rebecca Costa-Brown | Alexandria/Fortuna | Contessa
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	1. Moonbeam

I really wish that I had met Emily in some other circumstance. Eyes meeting across the table of that too-cutesy coffee place just off campus, the one that Rebecca loves, and Contessa pretends to despise. Sharing the same class, developing a budding friendship and more off half a hundred lazy walks through mazes of brutalist corridors. Perhaps on exercise, one of us performing some feat of (simulated) heroism that left the other grinning from ear to ear in amazement and exhilaration. 

Honestly, I’d take meeting at a goddamned bird sanctuary ride over the truth. 

Now, to give whichever rom-com writer Heaven had assigned to my life their due, we did meet on an ROTC exercise. Only, instead of doing something cool, I was screaming at a first year. 

In my defence, I thought said first-year – later learnt she was called Sherrell Bailey – had managed to do a negligent discharge. Yes, with a blank round, and yes, she had her BFA fitted correctly, but even so; that sort of thing was wholly unacceptable. If the platoon leader had caught her, we’d be getting smoked for days. Really, a stern talking to was lenient, all things considered. 

But for one thing. Bailey hadn’t done the ND. Calvert had. 

And so, the first time I met Emily wasn’t some cutesy, romantic moment full of sunshine and unicorns and fancy drinks with umbrellas (whose purpose I never did understand). Rather, it was at three in the morning, surrounded by gormless first-year cadets, pissing with rain – and then an indistinct figure was saying, sharply, “Adan, you’re disciplining the wrong fucking person, get your fucking act together - now.” 

\--- 

All that in mind, our actual first meeting was in the queue to the armoury. The heavens had opened, and instead of the expected angels and hymnals of praise, we got rain. Lots of it. Gortex till ENDEX, fuck me. And, of course, as a cadet NCO, I got to be last in line. All the snot-nosers were filing off to the centrally heated bus. Alex was standing with a big bag of candy at the door, handing it off to them with that stupid grin that said, ‘I got a good night’s sleep because I didn’t have firewatch.’ 

So: rain, mud, annoying cadet officers. 

Oh, and the armoury was shut. ‘Temporarily’. Sure. For the past hour. The hell were they even doing in there? Injecting CLP intravenously or something? 

“Not sure, seems too intricate. They’re probably just hoarding it,” came a voice from behind me. I started, and turned, and realised with growing embarrassment that I’d said the thing about CLP out loud. God but I was tired. 

“Piggot,” I replied with the affectedly casual air of someone who’s relying on a name tag but didn’t want to be obvious about. She nodded, briefly, a flash of blonde hair showing from behind her cap. 

“Adan. Armoury woes?” 

“Got it in one.” I looked again – she wasn’t carrying a rifle. “You’ve put yours away?” If she had, why wasn’t she on the bus with everyone else? 

“Yeah, got it in just before the doors closed.” She paused a moment, then shrugged in response to my unanswered but all too obvious question. “I don’t mind the rain.” 

“You don’t mind the rain.” I repeated back, a bald statement of incredulity. 

She shrugged again, a little awkwardly – but then went on the offensive. “Didn’t you win the Ranger Challenge last year?” 

“West Point is pretty dry,” I countered. 

“Come on. The Point is not dry.” 

I thought about sticking to my guns for a moment, trying to push back but – well, she was right. “Yeah, alright, you got me. It was nasty weather. But you just push through, right? You don’t have to enjoy it.” 

“I didn’t say I enjoyed the rain,” she corrected, archly. “I said I don’t mind it.” 

I flapped my free hand at her. “Same thing.” 

“It’s not like I seek out places to get rained on, is it?” 

I made a broad, sweeping gesture at the totality of the waterlogged field and the bus standing by at the edge of the road. “You could be on the bus right now.” 

“Alright, sure,” she admitted, beating a verbal retreat – no, not a retreat, that implied something headlong and she wasn’t. “But maybe I’m out here for the company. Who knows?” 

“Come on, Piggot, my head isn’t a balloon.” 

“Your head isn’t a…what, sorry?” Puzzlement glittered in ice-blue eyes. 

“You know, like, something you inflate, making my head bigger, arrogance…” My voice trailed off, each word quieter than the next until the final stopping point. It wasn’t that I didn’t like jokes – I did, a lot - it’s just no one got them, and I had to explain them and – sucked, really. 

“Oh,” she said, and then giggled. I looked at her, and she stopped. Then she did it again. “Sorry,” she said, with a bit of regained composure. “That was pretty good.” 

“Was it, though?” 

“For sure. Good situational awareness, multiple layers, clear delivery. If this whole shooting people thing doesn’t work out, I’d say you’ve got a future in stand up.”   
I could feel a blush slowly creeping up into my cheeks and thanked all that was holy for the cam cream that hid it. “Well, thanks,” I said, in at least a vague approximation of disinterest. It wasn’t that I cared about comedy, or ever wanted to be a comedian, but it was…nice, yes that was the word, it was nice getting complimented about something not to do with war. 

There was a moment of silence. 

“My name is Emily, by the way, just in case you were – wanted to know.” 

“Hana,” I said, and took her hand to shake gravely. “Though I’ll probably still call you Piggot.” 

She snorted. “And you, Adan.” 

There was an unintelligible shout from behind us. I turned, and the armoury was open, that blessed place of rest. “Hey,” Emily said. “Do you think we could hang out some time?”   
I ripped my eyes from the glorious destination. “Uh, sure,” I said, with a trademark lack of art. “I’ll get your number on the bus.” 

\--- 

What we retroactively agreed was our first date – heavy emphasis on the retroactive – involved a run, a bridge, and more miserable weather. 

“Look,” said Emily, as we jogged down the country lane; a bus ride away from the college, but worth it for the lack of pedestrians; “I’m not saying that rain is fun. Because rain isn’t fun. Objectively. But it’s just not a big deal.” 

“Why are you wearing your Gore-Tex, then?” I asked, and then put on a burst of speed before she could answer. I was, after all, here to the prep for the ACFT. Not have a pleasant conversation. I’d already filled up my allotment of those for the week. 

Overfilled them, actually. Emily’s fault. 

She caught up in a few moments. Damn her fitness. Damn me more for slowing down, making it easier. I’d have to get to the gym after this. Alone. This was a complete disruption to my workout routine. 

Didn’t mean I didn’t like it. 

“It’s less of a deal to wear.” 

I huffed and didn’t make a reply. It was a silly argument anyway. Not even an argument. A mildly ill-tempered jibe to throw at her. The honest way she was answering it, all understanding and reasoned – frustrating. 

A minute, perhaps two, passed in silence broken only by the thudding slaps of our feet on the ground. It was what I wanted, right? A nice quiet run. Quick, too. I liked that it was raining. More motivation to complete the circuit. But – well, when I got back to college, I had half a dozen things to do without Emily. And it seemed a shame not to talk. We should’ve got a coffee or something. My fault for trying to mix exercise and socialising. Could only do one well at the best of times, and with the two together, and prioritising, just – difficult. 

“We’re going over that bridge, right?” Her voice was sudden in the silence, accompanied with a pointing finger – like a conductor’s baton. Why had I thought of that? Never mind. 

“Yeah,” I said. 

“Looks rickety.” I glanced over. There was a slight smile playing on her face. Just a little, a small thing to whet the wit. If I’d been someone else, someone I paid less attention to, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. 

“It’ll be fine, I’ve done this before.” 

She gave me a dubious look and shrugged – an achievement for a jogger. I had done it before, running across the little wooden bridge, but it was a while back. The thing was going to be nasty in this weather. And no safety rails or anything. Not that it stood over a gorge or anything. More like a fetid pond. Not a big deal. 

We took the bridge without another word. And then, half-way across, I slipped. 

One moment, upright. The next, falling – sideways. I reached out a hand towards Em - towards anything to try to catch myself. It didn’t work. 

With an unhealthy splat, I landed back-first into the pond. 

Only, it wasn’t a pond. The water was, on closer inspection, much more like mud. Gloopy. I tried to move a leg. It was stuck. Emily had come back around, was standing atop the bridge – just a metre up, but I couldn’t reach. “Are you okay, Hana?” she asked, something I couldn’t interpret in her words. 

“I’m stuck,” I said, and hated myself for how plaintive it sounded. “Yeah, I know, laugh it up. Take a photo or something. Go fucking wild.” 

“I’m not going to do that, Hana. I’ll get you out.” She sounded hurt, and then I hated myself for how caustic I’d been. God. This really wasn’t a good run. 

She sat down on the side of the bridge, so I didn’t have to stare up towards her and the sun started to shine wanly through the clouds. “You’re not going to sink, right? This isn’t a quicksand thing?” she asked, and I would have thought it was a jokey comment, but there was real trepidation there. 

“No, I don’t think so.” I made a testing flailing motion. “Nope.” 

She let out a breath. “Alright. I’ll be back in a sec.” She stood and walked a few metres back up the track towards a stand of sickly-looking trees. I wanted to ask what she was doing, where she was going, whether she was going to leave me – she broke off a hefty stick and came back, squelching to the edge of the pond-marsh-quagmire of embarrassing hell. 

“I don’t think me falling over is a good excuse for arboreal vandalism,” I noted. 

“Shut up and let me work,” she replied with good tempered irascibility. At least I hoped it was good tempered, it sounded like it, but would she really want to work out with some idiot who fell in a goddamn pond? 

Her steps towards me were careful, and she tested the muck with the stick held before her like a mine detector, like a – I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head, that wasn’t a memory I was going to go back into. Not now. Not ever. 

And then with a suddenness that belied the squelching, she was standing right next to me. I craned my neck to look up. “Just your luck,” she said with a wry grin. “You fell in the one deep bit.” 

“You’re fucking kidding me.” 

“The stick doesn’t lie.” 

“Right,” I said. “So, you’re closer now, but how am I getting out again?” 

“It’s a tough engineering challenge, to be sure.” A moment of consideration. “Try lifting your back up, leave the legs for now.” 

I tensed and hauled, like the world’s worst weighted sit-up, and the mud gave way with a sudden squelching sound. Man, I’d be feeling that in my core for days. And then I was just sitting in the mud, looking like an idiot. 

“Well, that’s half of it,” I commented with intent to be funny and then I realised Emily probably didn’t want a play-by-play narration of getting her stupid fucking acquaintance out of a pond. 

“For sure,” she said, and knelt down behind me. “I think I can probably pull you out now?” There was a question in her voice, and I shrugged. 

“I’m field artillery, not combat engineering. Wouldn’t know the mechanics.” 

“I was – I was checking if you were alright with me pulling you out,” she said, and – oh. Right. Why didn’t I get that? It’d be a wonder if she’d ever look me in the eye again. 

“No Emily, I want to stay partially submerged in mud until I starve to death.” 

She snorted with laughter. “Alright, here we go,” and then she’d grabbed my upper arms and was pulling me up onto the more stable ground. It tickled a bit, but I couldn’t let that on, couldn’t distract her. Slowly at first, then with an increasing swiftness, my legs came loose – then, with a pop, they were out. 

And covered in muck. Goddamnit. 

I scrambled up to my feet and made an effort not to look down. “I’d give you a hug,” I said, “but there’s no point ruining your clothes too.” There was a moment of wild fantasy where I thought she might laugh and hug me anyway. 

Instead, with commendable solemnity, she nodded. “That would probably be wise. I think we should make for the bus now?” 

And so, we did. And she decided to sit next to me, so in the end, her clothes got pretty muddy as well. 

\--- 

The more conventional second date, again retroactively adjudicated, was meant to be a coffee and a walk. Instead, it turned into a demonstrative lesson in security force assistance. 

“I swear,” Emily was saying, “if I’ve got to listen to Alex one more time about his thesis, I will kill something.” 

I made my face into the perfect mask of earnestness. “You’re not a fan of Mongolian bread supply chains?” 

“No,” she said, stormily. “I’ll admit, it was vaguely of interest the first time. But the forty-fifth time? Seriously? The word ‘Kamchatka’ is losing all meaning for me.” 

“It has meaning to you?” I said, examining her quizzically, and then regretted it by nearly walking into a branch overhanging the path. 

“For sure, it’s critical to understanding a potential contingency in the Kurils.” 

A yawn ripped its way out from me, and I blushed. 

“I’m not boring you?” Emily asked, and there was a nervous edge in her voice. Hard to detect but it was there if you listened to her carefully. And I always did that. 

“No, not at all,” I said. “Just a late night.” 

“A late night?” 

I smiled a little. “Don’t worry, I’m not seeing another woman or something.” Her smile was nervous, but I'd take it. “One of my friends was asking for tactical advice in her war on the raccoons.” 

“War…on the raccoons?” Her expression was a curious mix of puzzlement and intense interest. 

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “The bin at her halls broke, they’ve got a bit of a raccoon infestation. She’s trying to flush them out.” 

“Do you think we could help?” 

I slowed in my walk. “Do you really want to spend time doing pest control?” I almost said, ‘our time together’, but that sounded too much, too possessive, too akin to a proposition and I – I wasn’t against the idea, but it all seemed a bit fast and radical. And maybe she didn’t like me? I didn’t know, and I – it wasn’t worth the risk of losing her as a friend. 

“Well,” Emily said, her words spooling with customary carefulness. “My suspicion is that anyone odd enough to declare war on raccoons would be worth watching, at least.”   
I snorted. “Rebecca…Rebecca certainly is that, if nothing else. I’ll give her a call? See how the warfighting effort is going?” 

Emily nodded and made a go-on gesture. One short call with Rebecca, which did not illuminate much beyond some odd thwacking sounds, and a quick walk and we were there. 

I regarded the ground of the dorm garden with…admiration coupled with horror? I was unclear on the specifics of the nomenclature. 

For Rebecca had dug – in fact, was still digging over in the corner – elaborate lines of contravallation. A trench, perhaps a hand deep, snaked from one edge of the grass to the other. Behind it reared a banked wall of earth, topped for much of the distance with cocktail sticks. 

I glanced over at Emily, to see her near-keeling over with contained laughter. “You alright?” I asked, not unkindly, but just to check she wasn’t going to choke or something. 

It took her a few moments to get her breath back. “I’m – I’m fine,” she wheezed. “I just – it’s so beautiful and yet so without purpose.” 

I rolled my eyes a little. Of course, the engineer aspirant would think it was beautiful. “Do you want to talk to its creator?” I asked. 

She sucked in a breath to regain her composure. “Yes, I would. I very much would.” 

And so, we marched through the rough country of the lawn to where Rebecca was huddled, digging. Emily looked to me to disturb. “Rebecca?” I said politely. She sprung up like a shot, whirling and holding us at trowelpoint. Then she saw us and calmed down a bit. 

“Sorry, I thought you were one of the raccoons,” she said. I looked at her and she blushed a little. “It’s been a long day, alright.” 

Emily stepped forward a bit, holding out her water bottle – metal, olive green, Army crest. Nothing if not on brand. “Here, have this. You’re probably dehydrated.” 

Rebecca took it and sipped greedily, then blinked and put the bottle down. “You’re Emily, right?” 

Emily nodded. 

“Hana’s told me a lot about you.” 

At this profound injustice, I had to but it. “I definitely haven’t.” 

“Yes, you have, like that time you got yelled at,” Rebecca advanced. 

Oh. Yes, I did tell her that. Damn. I turned nervous eyes to Emily, but she just seemed amused, and was busily redirecting the conversation anyway. 

“So, what are you building here, Rebecca?” 

“Fortifications,” replied Rebecca. “The raccoon menace is living in the bushes next to the dorm wall, close to the bin.” She swung her arm at the shrubbery accusatorily. “I need to block their advance.” 

Emily turned an assessing eye to the field. “You can’t expect that obstacle to stop a raccoon at full run?” 

“No, no,” Rebecca said, with the ardent factfulness of someone rushing to explain things to a professional. “It just slows them down long enough for me to get at them with the trowel. That’s the theory anyway.”

“Right. I notice you don’t have a cleared killing zone. Maybe something to think about?” 

It was a fair critique, the long grass would hide most racoon approaches, and I would have kicked myself for not making it if half of me wasn’t gawking at the absurdity of the situation, and the other half wasn’t admiring Emily for her (mildly misplaced) professionalism. 

Rebecca had produced a little notebook from somewhere and was mumbling something murder cages as she scribbled things down. 

“Of course,” Emily went on, “if they’ve got nests in the bushes and food in the bin, enticing them out for a decisive battle would be rather tricky. I’d recommend an artillery bombardment.” She nodded at me with a slight smile. “Of course, that’s more Hana’s field than my own.” 

In retrospect, as I’d told her years later to howls of amusement, that was when I first decided that I had a crush on Emily Josephine Piggot.


	2. Matinee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WW2!AU in which the SOE enlists multiple talents to kill the Angel of the Ruhr AKA Purity.

**64 Baker Street**   
**London, UK**   
**September 17th - 1942**

“Thank you for coming, Jim, I appreciate it was on short notice,” said Thomas Fairchild, Esq. 

Air Marshal James Leigh-Mallory waved it away and sat back into the Georgian-vintage chair. “Think nothing of it, Tom. An invitation from Baker Street is hardly something to decline.” 

Thomas’ eyebrows darted towards his hairline. “You make it sound positively dastardly.” 

“I’m really just here for the port.”

“A booze-hound from Cambridge on, eh?” 

James shrugged a little – impressive, in his starched-stiff uniform. “Can’t beat Jerry without it.” 

“Quite right, quite right.” Thomas poured a generous measure into the empty glasses on the scorched wood desk. “1938 vintage – donated by a Mrs. Carol Dallon for the war effort.” 

James raised his glass. “A toast to Mrs. Dallon, then.” Glasses clinked. “Anyway,” he went on, “I doubt you’d haul me over from the Air Ministry for a dinner party. What have you scoundrels got cooking?” 

“We’ve tracked down the Angel of the Ruhr,” Thomas said, voice a hair less gregarious as he slid a handful of photographic plates over to James. “Short-exposure shots from one of Richter’s Mosquitos.” 

James took them gingerly. Four photos, each showing a humanoid figure picked out in sharp relief against a dimly glowing white corona. Two of them, close to the ground, showed a small town – picturesque in that regimented German style. He set the plates back down. “It’s a metahuman, then?” 

“Yes – not a machine. Hence the failure two weeks ago.” 

“Bloody good work, Tom. Arthur will be delighted!” The so-called Angel of the Ruhr had appeared a few months ago. Manoeuvrable, accurate, devastating. It had blown entire squadrons of bombers out of the sky – stopped the putative bombing offensive in its tracks. Bomber Command had assumed it was some new Luftwaffe contraption, saturated all the airfields in the region. Nothing came of it. 

“One thing to know it. Another to kill it.” 

James simmered down a little and took another draught of port. “Of course, of course. We mustn’t get over-excited.” 

“Quite so,” said Thomas, with a studiously phlegmatic air. “We’ve got a plan – at least the beginnings of one. Bomb the town with Richter’s lot to flush it out. Then fighters to converge and kill, if it didn’t die on the ground. Issue is getting the stream into German territory without interception.” 

“617 could knock out the radars,” said James, then corrected. “Wouldn’t work, though. Angel would already be in the air if that happened.” 

“Can we get radar proof craft?” 

“We’ve fiddled with the concept,” James said, slowly. “Never a pressing operational need before, but we’ve got to get rid of this thing. I’ll talk to the boffins, Wallis perhaps. See if they can whip something up.” 

“Thank you. Perhaps you can come back on Sunday?” Thomas said. James affirmed it and went for the door. Then he paused and turned back around. 

“Say, we can’t keep calling…whatever this thing is, an angel. Do you have a name for it?” 

A smile crept onto Thomas’s habitually dour face. “As a matter of fact, we do. Some of the boys have taken to calling it Purity.” 

\--- 

**Suffield Testing Ground**   
**Alberta, Canada**   
**September 20th – 1942**

Colin slopped another load of the tar-black paint over the airframe and sighed loudly. One of Theresa’s bodies, on the other side of the hangar, turned to look at him. “You alright?” 

“I think you know the answer to that,” he replied, with more bitterness than he intended. Not that Theresa cared – one of the manifold beauties of her automative intelligence was a keen insight into how humans thought. Better than his own, as much as he was loath to admit it. 

“It is rather cold,” she replied, and he let out a grudging chuckle. Theresa had decided to start feeling temperature after the defence of Singapore, when the heat and humidity nearly rusted her gears clean away. “But really, I know this isn’t what you want – but you can’t be in service all the time.” 

“I can do far more than 25 missions, believe that.” He’d been taken off the line a month ago, for mandatory rest, and it still smarted. “And now I’m working to let someone else serve.” The next stroke of the brush was harder, faster, more defined. Colin Wallis did not get hasty when he got angry. 

“Colin, you know the mortality rates – “ she said, with what the clockwork no doubt thought was a consoling tone. 

He turned to face her, setting down the paint with an over-controlled gentleness. “I know damn well what the mortality rates are. And I know I can beat the odds far better than any other pilot in this war. When they send boys to die out of ‘concern’ for my health, all they’re showing is their own cowardice.” 

The banked heat of his words died, plunging into icy melancholy. “At least you get an escape from this. Get to fly and fight, not only painting the aircraft of second-rate pilots.” He knew he was being unfair. The radar-absorbent material was a profound innovation, perhaps even war-winning. But people lauded the artist, not the brush-maker. 

“But, Colin, I’m a machine,” said Theresa, stepping toward him with something approaching hesitance. 

“I – “ he almost said ‘I wish I was, too’, but thought better of it, and finished with a damp coda. “I know. I know.” And then he turned back to the plane and hefted the paint and began work again. “They’ll have to fly in low, though,” he said with a professionalism so absolute only Theresa could tell it was forced. 

“Why so?” she asked. 

“The coverage, it’s possible we did our job too well. Too absorbent.” He was still working at that same certain pace, but his voice was calmer. Less pronounced. Talking about practical issues was – calming. “If they fly high, they might be silhouetted out against the sky as voids. Low, in among trees and hills, it’ll be the odd blip among ground clutter.” 

“I’ll be sure to tell the Air Ministry,” said Theresa. Colin nodded, and grunted, and went back to the aircraft. 

The three planes were finished later that day; a record in aircraft production. 

\--- 

**Duisburg**   
**Ruhr Valley, Germany**   
**September 24th – 1942**

Aisha Laborn hated trains. Not in an inherent way, there wasn’t any childhood trauma about them. In fact, she had to admit, they had their uses. She could even see why some people liked them. 

Just not her. Because she was hiding in a half-full wagon of dirty coal, juddering over provincial railroads. Again. She cursed the Special Operations Executive with silent vehemence. Why, oh why, had they put her into Germany and not North Africa? 

She knew the answer, of course. Her metahuman gift let her slip past nearly any sentry, waltz merrily into headquarters – good stuff. In theory. Practically, the fucking Germans had put cameras everywhere. So, rather than chilling out on a first-class train to Duisburg, she’d had to hop in and out of carts, dodge the main stations, cut across fields and through sopping wet forests. 

Real secret agent shit. Emphasis on shit. 

The train juddered to a stop, and she glanced down at her watch. She’d snuck a look at the timetable before it left. This was the station, probably; time to move. She’d alighted too early before, assuming a delay or crater was a station, and ended up stuck in the wilderness. 

She relaxed into her power, grasped the lip of the wagon, and in a feat of athleticism that would surely have stunned her classmates, levered herself off the side of the train. No time to linger on the tracks – the station platforms were up ahead, perhaps with a camera. She dashed into the treeline fringing the area, staying low. It looked stupid. Better stupid than dead. 

She unspooled the silk map from her sleeve – neat little Limey invention – and found the station to be in the right place. A small village in the outskirts of Duisburg, where Purity, or The Angel of the Ruhr, or whatever they were calling that metahuman. Recon photos had a reasonably confident ID on it, but they wanted someone on the ground. Especially when it came to bombing the place; the radio transmitter to guide in the planes weighed heavily in her pack. 

It had been five days since she’d been dropped in. Now, the objective was just on the other side of the hill. She set off with something approaching cheer. It was always a good day to kill a Nazi. 

\--- 

**15,000 feet above Cherbourg**   
**Contenin, France**   
**September 25th – 1942**

“This is Zero, Comm check,” crackled the cockpit radio. Flight Lieutenant Daniel Featheringham – a silly name which he was not much fond of – leant forward a little to answer. 

“Hello Zero, Baker One-Four confirms.” 

The other two pilots in the formation, four ships in total if they counted Zero, signed off as well. Usually they’d do the radio checks over the Channel, but the new planes were stealthed up to the gizzards, so the boffins said, and it was important to test that capability on the radio. 

Not, Daniel thought with a surge of guilty pleasure, that it would be much of a test. Bomber Command was hitting Heligoland in force, and their target was a small depot just past Cherbourg. Not even on the peninsula. A milk run, to be sure, but one step closer to the 25-mission benchmark. 

It was a moonless night, and they were running near entirely on instruments. Someone at the Air Ministry, no one in the squadron was entirely sure who, had told them to fly in low to the target, tree-top height. Zero had done as Zero did, and nodded, and smiled, and then laughed at the farcical idea behind the functionary’s back. Flying that low, by instrument alone - simply not possible. Even Wallis couldn’t do that. Probably. One did hear stories about Darkest Peru, but that was just propaganda. 

Besides, they were all stealthed up. “This is Zero, prep for drop in 30 seconds on my mark…mark.” 

His hands flashed out over the command console, adjusting buttons and levers, feeling them click into place through his fine kidskin gloves. The plane jolted a little, slowing and turning to attack angle as the bomb-bay doors opened. Drop, home, and away to The Eagle Club in an hour or so. 

So, of course, that was when everything went wrong. 

A flare shot into the sky with sudden, terrible brightness. Daniel recoiled, one hand over his eyes, the other springing to the joystick to keep some semblance of control. He could see One-Three spiralling away, out of the bomber stream, something leaking from it 

Fire sprung from below, flak but far too accurate, smashing through Zero in a fireball made only harsher by the brilliant light. 

Something moved, impossibly, on the front of his craft. He had only a moment to look and beheld a spectral figure, before a spear smashed clean through the cockpit – and his head. 

\---

 **64 Baker Street**  
 **London, UK**  
 **September 26th - 1942**  
“Well,” said James with leaden heaviness. “That could have gone better.” 

“Quite so,” said Thomas. “And, to make matters worse, we’re out of port.” 

“Truly?” asked James, sounding even more despondent. Bad news sat heavier without a good drink to wash it down. 

“Yes. A delivery should be coming soon, never fear.” 

There was a moment of silent contemplation, then James spoke again. “Well, I spoke to Wallis. He thought something like this might happen – said they flew in too high, their radar-proofing made them too obvious without any clutter in the way. They needed to go in at tree-top height.” 

“You know better than I that we don’t have enough pilots of sufficient quality for that. Not to mention, once in the Ruhr, they’ll get spotted from the ground easy enough if they’re that low.” 

“We can’t call Richter in on this?” 

“Unfortunately, not,” said Thomas. “Slim’s wrangled most of her to take back the Dutch East Indies. I appealed to the PM, but he said we need to keep up with the yanks in that theatre. Can’t have Alexandria overshadowing us. I’m barely holding on to that one reconnaissance squadron.” 

“Politics,” said James, like it was a dirty word. 

“Indeed. Better news is that our ground asset has reached Purity’s town. She can’t – “ 

“She?” 

“Don’t get all hidebound on me now, Jim,” said Thomas, chidingly. “She can’t search every house there – we don’t know what Purity looks like when she’s not a fascist halogen bulb, after all.” 

“So, we need to flush her out,” said James, not liking how the words felt on his lips. “We’ll lose every bomber we send, near enough.” 

“It’ll be worth it,” said Thomas, with the supreme equanimity of the self-controlled, or the heartless, or both. 

James sighed explosively. “I know – I just, I never was any good at that. I’ll bring in Arthur, this is more his field.” 

Thomas made to reply, but then the phone on his desk rang with a harsh buzz in the still air. He answered at once, hand cracking out like a pistol to grab it. He spoke quietly, and then put it down, and chanced a smile at the thunderous James. “Good news. We will have port after all. Mrs Dallon sent her daughter to bring us a new case – the normal manservant is away, apparently.” 

James smiled, but it was a pallid thing. The prospect of sending eight hundred men to certain death made the idea of wine tasting a little less fun. 

The office door swung open, and a girl – a teenager, reckoned James, perhaps in her early twenties, though he was unsure – practically bounced through, the wine case held almost casually in one hand. “Mr Fairchild, sir?” she said. 

“That’s right. Put it over here, if you would?” said Thomas, indicating a spot next to his desk. She did so and made to leave with commendable efficiency. 

James stopped her with an upraised hand. “What’s your name?” 

“Victoria Dallon, Air Marshal,” she said with the sort of curt politeness which suggested she had the training for the conversation, yet none of the inclination. 

“Ms. Dallon, do you happen to be an amateur weightlifter?” Victoria blinked and said nothing. Thomas leaned forward curiously, and James went on. “I ask because that case must have weighed, what, 30 pounds?” 

“Well, sir,” she replied with a slightly nervous smile. “it’s not that heavy, in the grand scheme of things and – “ 

“I’d also observe, Ms. Dallon, that you moved very lightly when you came into the room. Even with prodigious strength, that would be a difficult feat.” 

Her tone turned wintery. “Sir, I am unsure as to the purpose of this line of questioning but I must protest, I am here to deliver a gift, not be subjected to – “ 

James cut her off. “If I may conclude, Ms. Dallon? Are you a metahuman?” 

The expression on her face said it all. 

\--- 

**Duisburg**  
 **Ruhr Valley, Germany**  
 **October 22nd – 1942**  
Victoria Dallon was indeed a parahuman – she could fly and had an enhanced level of strength and durability matched only by Alexandria. She was the answer to the Purity problem. With sufficient training, the Air Ministry believed, she could bail out of a bomber stream over the Ruhr and proceed by stealth to knock out Purity as she made an attack.

The SOE leapt into action along with the RAF, running her through an accelerated training program in a special facility in Scotland. It took weeks of gruelling effort, weeks in which allied pilots died and the Ruhr remained near untouched. But by the end of it, Victoria Dallon was trained to fight. 

She got one day off. Then she was stuffed into the bomb bay of a Lancaster bound for Duisburg. 

The stream was not a large one, perhaps a hundred aircraft in all. It had escorts most of the way into the continent – designed to stop the Germans mounting a major attack on it before the Duisburg region. 

Not a sure guarantee, as the ill-fated Cherbourg penetration showed, but a better chance than another plan. And it seemed like it was working. 

“Pilot to crew. Comm check,” crackled the headset in Victoria’s ear, sounding over the howling wind and thrumming vibration of the engines. The crew members sounded off one by one, a collage of accents and attitudes, from the surly waist gunner to the taciturn navigator to the barely understandable bombardier. 

Then it was her turn. “Payload, ready to drop.” It seemed rather undignified to refer to oneself as ‘payload’. She had lobbied for a more interesting name, but that had been slapped down. As Ruta, the bombardier, had explained – with a wide smile and many hand gestures to make up for his sketchy grasp on English – it was easier for the crew to think of her as a munition than as a person. 

Comforting. 

“Navigator to payload. We’re 10 minutes from DZ.” She nodded, not that anyone could see or would care if they did. Someone – the command weren’t saying – had put an experimental radio transmitter on the ground at the target; a necessity given its small size. Even if Purity wasn’t in a fighting mood, demolishing her town would probably do the trick. From there, Victoria could be dropped out of the bomber and take her down. 

Of course, that assumed she, if it even was a she, was in the area. If not, then they would be incinerating a village full of innocent civilians with no value to anything. She turned the uncomfortable thought over a little, before stuffing it away into the recesses of her mind. She had to believe what they were doing was right. 

10 more minutes. Then she’d be killing someone. It was a queasy thought, no matter the training. 

Then the radio suddenly came alive, spitting fragments through static. 

“Glow on the – “ 

“CO’s craft down, Purity at – “ 

“She’s moving!” The waist machine-gun fired off with a sound like tearing paper. 

“Pilot to bombardier,” came a rushed, tense voice. “Drop the payload.” 

Victoria had about three seconds to process it before the bomb bay doors swung open and she was – falling, tumbling through the night sky. With a jerk, she pulled on her powers and stood upright on nothingness. 

Purity was obvious, a harshly brilliant star in the sky above. Tracers licked out towards her from the bomber stream, but she retaliated with thick beams of white light. Even as Victoria watched, another ship was hit by one – the wing sheared, and the fuel tank cooked off. A fireball. 

No chutes. 

She had to stop this. A curious fear, a terror of those fat white beams, gripped her and she shook it off with anger and moved – scudding through the sky, under the bombers as they roared on past like freight trains. 

Come in low, the instructors had said, where Purity won’t be looking. 

Another white beam stabbed overhead, but not at her. Not at Victoria. 

She was under the target now – couldn’t think of her as anything else – and came surging up with a rush of power, putting all her desperate energy into the lunge, knowing she could only do it once, and – 

Her fist connected. It crunched. 

The light died. 

The Angel of the Ruhr looked at Victoria with blank eyes, and slid off her outstretched hand, and fell. 

And that was that. 


	3. Disaster of Dual Cauldrons!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cast of LBD meet their equivalents in Worm. Sadness ensues. My thinking is that the Sarr's get on well, the Number Men are just chill, Alexandria feels some slight sense of nurturing instinct towards Rebecca driven by wistfulness for her lost opportunities, and Contessa...is Contessa.

**Doctor Sarr**  
“I would apologise for your treatment, but we both know that would be unserious,” said the black woman in the white labcoat. Doctor Sarr was entirely sure what to call her. Human cloning technology had hardly advanced far enough for nomenclature to be a concern of hers. 

“Quite.” said Doctor Sarr. “Our presence was wholly unexpected?” 

“Yes,” said the woman, with a bluntness that betrayed, in the smallest ways, how flummoxed she really was. “We have the capacity for travel between dimensions, but the ones closest to our own are inaccessible. An actual duplicate, to the fidelity we have of each other – unprecedented.” 

“I assume,” said Sarr after an infinitesimal pause to process things and ensure she did not waste either of their time on meaningless surprise, “that you operate with more advanced capabilities than I do.” 

“I would assume so,” the other her said in a voice as bland as oatmeal. “My chain of universes is home to what you might term as superheroes.” 

Doctor Sarr blinked, and nodded, and recalculated. “I suppose the threats you have to deal with are more substantial than my own.” 

“Yes,” the other said. “We ran postcognitive analysis on you. Climate change, disease, asteroids – commendable, especially with the resources you have.” 

Sarr’s smile was tinged with bitterness. “Still seems a losing battle. Not to mention managing some of the staff – I imagine you have Manton here?” 

Her counterpart’s façade cracked a little, though with amusement or sadness or fear she could not tell. “Yes. He killed and ate one of my co-workers.” 

“He what now?” Sarr couldn’t stop the outburst. Instead, she chanced a nervously redirecting smile “I was going to complain about the creepy letters.” 

“They’re not ideal either,” the other said diffidently, sang-froid firmly back in place. “In any case, we will shortly reverse engineer your method of travel here. I imagine we can find our way to some form of association.” 

“That would be very welcome, though I’m unclear what value my organisation could provide to yours?” 

“If I may be honest?” said her counterpart with a weariness that seemed for a moment all consuming. “Just another sane person to talk to would be worth quite a bit.” 

\--- 

**Rebecca**  
“Okay so you’re me, right? Like an alternative dimension version of me but much cooler? And older? Or are you actually like my mom but you look like me or what?” Rebecca, as it turned out, asked questions when she got panicked. She usually didn’t get panicked, the bar was quite high after the whole ‘malignant cancer’ thing, but it was within the range of possible responses, nonetheless. 

“Alternate dimension,” said her duplicate, from across the table. Except it wasn’t really her duplicate? Rebecca could see some vague contours of herself in the form, same shade of skin, similar hair, but – there was something in the face and the eyes that spoke of weariness and harshness that she never had. 

Also, the muscles. Like, wow. Other her was built. If she was like that then Contessa wouldn’t be all confusing, no doubt about that. Was it creepy to ogle yourself, though? A bit - ? 

“A little bit, yes,” said the duplicate. 

Rebecca recoiled. “You can read minds?” she hissed. 

“No,” said the duplicate in a voice as dry as a substandard Baked Alaska. “I do have eyes, though. You can think of me as Alexandria, by the way.” 

“Alexandria?” Rebecca wondered. She’d never been a geography nerd. 

“My – how would you call it? My superhero name.” 

“You’re a superhero?!” asked Rebecca with much more excitement than sense. Alexandria indicated her skin-tight costume and long, flowing cape. “Oh. Right. Well, uh, I’m an English student.” 

Alexandria gave her a curt smile, overpolite. “Analysing Shakespeare is a form of heroism.” 

“Wow, okay,” Rebecca said, raising her hands as if they were a shield. “I thought you were other-me, not other-Contessa!” 

“Contessa?” Alexandria leant forward, a movement of millimetres yet with the gravitas, it seemed to Rebecca, of mountains. 

“M-my roommate, and – and my friend,” replied Rebecca. “She doesn’t much like English literature.” 

Of course, Alexandria had been briefed in on the strange dimensional copies the same as the rest of the top staff. But a briefing note was nothing next to a live interrogation. Not half as a fun, either. “Your crush?” 

Rebecca reddened, and said nothing, and Alexandria gave an abbreviated laugh. 

“Anyway,” Rebecca said after a few moments of awkward silence thick enough to cut. “How old are you?” Alexandria quirked an eyebrow. “Only, I mean, you look older than me but not that much older and I was just wondering and I’m sorry to be rude but – “ 

“But you’ve been kidnapped into an alternate dimension and are currently talking to an idealised clone of yourself? And you’re staving off the fear – quite effectively, I would add – by asking filler questions?”   
Rebecca shifted in her seat. “Not just filler, I mean a bit, but I am interested. You don’t meet a clone of yourself every day.” 

“Quite right,” Alexandria said. “Well, Rebecca, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re not even going to detain you for much longer.” 

“Not really a fan of detention as a general rule but okay.” Her words were glib, but they were underpinned by a very real relief. The offence, Alexandria knew, would come later. 

“In fact, I believe my organisation is looking towards a more permanent presence on your earth.” 

“Is that meant to be comforting? Because it sounds a bit like an alien invasion. Or a cross-dimensional invasion? Is it the same nomenclature?” 

Another, far shorter, almost real smile flickered on Alexandria’s face. “It’s not. I know from experience.” 

“Oh.” 

“Yes. As I was going to say, I would be interested in getting to know you a little better.” 

Rebecca blinked, and nodded with a vaguely slack-jawed expression. Not that there was much more she could do. When an alternate dimension Amazonian clone took an interest in your life, you nodded. 

Man, if this was a dream she was going to be having words with her subconscious. 

\--- 

**Philip**  
“What’s your name?” asked the other him, older – perhaps his late thirties – but the same face, the same hair, the same impeccable dress sense. 

“Philip,” said Philip. 

The man’s expression shifted, and he leant back a little in his chair – clearly hastily acquired, Pip could tell, awful lumbar support. “Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” 

“Star Wars? Really?” 

The man shrugged. “It’s a good stock option. You can call me Kurt. Seems like I’m your dimensional alternative. Or clone.” 

“You can call me?” Pip didn’t let that kind of sloppy verbiage pass him by, you couldn’t afford that sort of weakness on the mean streets of the South-Central debating circuit. 

“I was Philip once. Fell into some – what you could describe as child soldiering. Name change came out of it.” It was nonchalant retelling, practiced, and Pip couldn’t tell if it was fake or just a rehearsal of a defence over trauma. Probably the latter. 

“Seems like a reasonable response.” 

“Thank you.” Kurt cocked his head. “You’re taking all this fairly calmly.” 

“So are you,” Pip pointed out. 

“True, but my office is a cross-dimensional fortress where I file tax returns for supervillains. You’re a college student.” 

“What would be the point of panic?” Pip asked in response. “Beyond killing off bull markets, of course.” 

“It can provide some effective pressure on bear markets too, though.” 

“True, but that’s not a sure bet, right? Panic can just make a market more bearish.” 

By the time it came to separate the dimensional clones, Pip and Kurt had had a rousing seminar on the intricacies of stock manipulation and were well on their way to producing a paper on the implication of cross-dimensional travel on trade networks. 

\--- 

**Contessa**  
The portal irised open silently, a glowing white door in the wall. Contessa looked up at once, hand darting to her belt for the knife she didn’t have on her. A form walked through – her. She’d recognise the hat. But older, wearier, in a better contoured suit. 

Contessa opened her mouth, on instinct, to ask a question or to pose a theory or anything to this avatar of what she might become. 

Said avatar cocked her hand on her hip. “Well you’re a fucking weirdo,” she said. 

Contessa blinked. “Sorry I – “ 

“Seriously you’ve managed to psych yourself into a complete mess without even having a superpower. Take a breather, go to therapy, and read a book on sex ed.” 

This was not what Contessa had been expecting. 

A portal opened on the wall next to the other her. “Rebecca’s really into you by the way, get a clue you idiot,” she said, and then she stepped through and the portal blinked shut. 

  



	4. LBD Elseworlds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I asked T0P for some prompts, then re-wrote them to be (presumably) much more wholesome than intended.

**Philip In The Doghouse**   
_Prompt: Philip gets put in a doghouse. It is literal._

Philip regarded the puppies with keen intent. They gazed back with all the blank fecklessness they could muster – which, in Philip’s opinion, was all they could do. He wasn’t entirely sure why Contessa had decided to drop them off with him. 

He had been working through some early morning quadratic equations – nothing serious, but good for some light relief – when the door had practically been battered down. He’d opened it to find, not Rebecca or Jack, or any of the other people he expected would interrupt his math practice, but Contessa.

With a golden retriever puppy under each arm. 

She had thrust them upon him. “Here Pip, have these.” 

“Why?” he had responded with carefully honed confusion. 

“A surplus from a mission.” 

“You can’t dispose of them?” 

“No, they might be useful. Goodbye.” In a fluid motion, she deposited puppies in his hall, then shut the door with a quick kick. Naturally, Philip opened the door to continue the conversation. Naturally, Contessa had entirely disappeared in those four seconds. 

‘What am I going to do with you?’ he thought. He couldn’t kill them, if that was an option, Contessa would have done that already. Similarly, adopting them out seemed a dubious prospect – she would have done that, too, or at least told him that was what she wanted him to do. She liked being cryptic, not needlessly confusing. 

By process of elimination, then, it seemed that she just wanted him to take care of some puppies. 

Right then. He stood from his puppy-regarding position and made a mental situation assessment. He had to ensure they were in good stead for potentially the rest of their natural lives. It was important to limit knowledge of them – they might become work relevant, and there was a notional no pets policy in the halls. And, of course, he wanted to limit the damage they could inflict. 

The answer hit him with an obviousness usually reserved for multiplication. A doghouse. 

He had some shopping to do. But first, to move the puppies somewhere. Ah, right. The bathroom. If that piglet couldn’t escape the bath, he doubted they could either. 

\--- 

Philip returned from this shopping trip precisely one hour later. It took him no more than an additional half an hour to assemble the raw materials – even paying in cash, buying a pre-made doghouse could be an operational security risk. By the time he was done, there was a substantial box at the foot of his bed, with spaces for the dogs to sleep, slots to put dog food into, and an extensive area for them to do their math homework. Which he would be assigning. What was the point of shaping young lives if you didn’t get to tyrannically impose your favourite subjects on them? 

Study hall. Never forget. Never forgive. 

All in all, thought Philip, he couldn’t think of a better use for a doghouse at all. 

**Rebecca Walks In On Naked Jack**   
_Rebecca comes to bake cookies and finds Jacob waiting naked on the couch._

“Hi Philip! I’m here to – oh my god what the fuck,” said Rebecca, all thoughts of cookie making cast asunder by the…figure on the couch. 

“Hey,” Jack said in a tone some kilometres south of sultry. “Maybe we could – “ 

“Nope!” yelled Rebecca with the sort of volume that made flatmates cry. “Nope, nope, nope. Put some fucking clothes on.” And then she left, shutting the door with much too much force. Why the fuck was he there? Like, it wasn’t that she hated Jack although obviously Contessa didn’t like him and why was he naked and – oh. 

Oh. 

Well. 

She cursed herself for her stupidity, and it took the last shreds of restraint not to start yelling imprecations at her brain. 

That was why Jack and Philip had come together to the mall with her and Contessa. That’s why they’d split off so quickly into pairs. They were dating! Or at least in some sort of wibbly-wobbly friends with benefits kind of relationship. That was why he was just chilling out naked on the couch, it made perfect sense. 

And that meant that him and Contessa weren’t…involved. 

And that meant that Contessa was, well, saying wide open seemed to demean her and them and their relationship but – but it meant she wasn’t taken! Probably! 

Whispering self-doubt started to rise. Maybe they were in a poly relationship? Maybe it was open? Maybe Contessa wanted Philip and that was why – no. No. She used all she left to step down on those treacherous thoughts. It was now or it was never. 

With shaking hands, she keyed in Contessa’s phone number. It rang once and then, “Yes, Rebecca?” 

“Hey, uh, I was wondering if we could maybe go on a date sometime?” Rebecca said, flushing and words spilling out faster and faster. It sounded so childish, so absurd, to think she could ever have a chance and there was a silence and a yawning void and – 

“That would be delightful,” Contessa replied, voice uncertain for a brief moment before good order reasserted itself. “I’ll email you my calendar shortly to arrange a time and place. See you then.” The line clicked shut. Something twisted in Rebecca’s gut. 

Two days later, they went on their first date.


End file.
